#TechTipTuesday – Microsoft Templates
Every Tuesday I share a Tech Tip on our social media pages to assist our staff in their use of technology as it relates to their role.
Mountain View School Division operates within a Microsoft Office 365 (O365) environment and this is the system that I have the most experience with as I also used it as a student and in my former teaching position with Turtle River School Division. As they have expanded their suite with purposeful education content, the template feature of O365 has grown immensely. They currently offer templates for the most-used Microsoft tools: Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.
Why do I love templates? To start, teachers have a million things on their plate and designing the creative elements of projects is just ONE MORE thing that can take away face-to-face time with students or impair work-life balance. Having templates available for newsletters, calendars, tracking sheets, etc can ensure that educators can get their content out much quicker! For students, the idea of moving from consumers of digital content to creators is important. However, there are many instances where the classroom reality is that tech time is limited. I think we can all think of students who will spend three classes picking out PowerPoint backgrounds and we are left with no way to assess what they actually know about their science project. Having templates available for students to input their information in allows for the primary focus to be on their content and the secondary, non-curricular, creative elements can be customized as a secondary focus.
Some of my favourite templates include:
- newsletters
- APA/MLA papers
- resumes/cover letters
- timelines
- certificates
- Lifeliqe pre-made science presentations
To learn more about templates and how to access them, check out this tutorial below!
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